Gabriel Dos Reis wrote: > On Mon, 14 May 2007, C Y wrote: > > | I hadn't heard of association with TeX as being a detrimental factor to > | a project. > > I'm pointing at the moon, don't look at my finger. > > The detrimental factor is not the association with TeX per se. > But setting TeX as the gold standard: to be blunt, that lacks ambition and > vision; I don't see how a research funding agency would be excited funding > something like that in 2007.
The vision, as I understand it, is to incorporate the vast body of mathematical knowledge that exists today in a form readily understandable and usable both by human and computer. How do we encode mathematical knowledge in such a fashion that there will be no major incentive to re-code it in the future? What is a system design that will scale as far as necessary? Some related questions: 1. How do we avoid duplicating research accidentally due to students/researchers not having the resources to do comprehensive literature searches? As the body of literature keeps growing the ability of one person to be aware of everything they could use decreases. How do we solve this problem? 2. Formal correctness proofs of mathematical statements in both science and mathematics as a default inclusion would be a considerable help in preventing certain types of errors. What kind of system do we need to merge formal proof systems and computer algebra systems? How should it be done? What features are needed? What kind of system is necessary to produce answers reliable enough for scientists to depend on them? TeX as such is only one small part of the puzzle. It (or something like it) is necessary but not sufficient. Literate programming or developments there-of are a tool, a means to an end. However, because literate programming has not seen a whole lot of development we need to implement the basic functionality before we scale beyond it. TeX is the "gold standard" in that it is probably the most widely known, widely used example of literate programming in action. It also does its job well enough to be a standard many years after the core work was completed. That makes it an interesting case study as well as a tool - its success over the long term is something to pay attention to. To my mind, funding development on Axiom at this stage should be properly viewed as doing groundwork for the future. The problems we are grappling with now are secondary - what we really want is the framework within which mathematical research via computer can scale. If Axiom proper is the space shuttle, right now we're working on the platform that moves it from the warehouse to the launch pad. Doesn't have much to do with mathematics per say, but it's absolutely essential infrastructure. The exciting part comes later. Whether this is something that should be funded, I don't know. I would think that a publicly available resource of this sort would be a logical thing for a government to support - it's a type of project that commercial organizations won't be interested in, and ideally it would provide the same benefits for mathematical research that the highway system does for national travel. That's just my opinion though - I have no detailed knowledge of the NSF/NIST funding mandates. Cheers, CY _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
